Taking The Great Gatsby as its central case study, this article discusses my method of teaching regional American literature in Nordic classrooms through a liberal use of maps. It argues that closely attending to the cities, states, and regions to which literary texts refer helps students better understand and scrutinize their larger claims.

This essay considers the pitfalls and rewards of using “western women writers” as a critical category of analysis, in part by surveying my own scholarly history with the concept. As a critical paradigm it continually breaks down, and yet, I contend, it persists. Its application yields insights into the texts, authorship, publication, and reception of numerous women writing from and about the West. Equally important, it yields insights into the relationships among these women and the patterns we can identify across their work. It is in large part because these women have been conceived as western in the past--whether by themselves or by publishers, readers, or scholars—that it is useful to continue to conceive of them as western in the present. Thus in addition to, or sometimes even instead of, thinking about what they do as western writers (analyzing their texts for regionally specific arguments), it is productive to think about how they are received as western writers. That is often where the patterns emerge across them, and where we can justifiably generalize. While the diversity of the actual West precludes essentialist claims, views about the West remain remarkably consistent.